Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

Was Ahmad hallucinating?

Or were you no longer able to see?

Perhaps, my friend, you weren’t capable of seeing your father walking beside your mother and wife in this exodus.

“It was as if I could see only darkness,” you told me.

Is it true that the area around the spring was strewn with the bodies of the forty young men who were killed there in cold blood?

Is it true that instead of burying the dead they used a bulldozer to push them into a communal pit, which didn’t get covered over properly so that people’s remains stuck out, mixed with earth?

Is it true that their demolition of the village was meant as revenge for Kherbet-Jeddin?

Saleh al-Jashi claimed you didn’t take part in the battle at Kherbet-Jeddin. I know he’s lying, and in any case, no one in the camp believes anything he says since the strange scene he made in ’72 following the Munich operation. People saw something they’d never seen before — a father jealous of his dead son!

Everyone raced to his house to offer their condolences after his son Husam was killed at the Munich airport, but instead of talking about Husam, he couldn’t stop talking about himself and his own acts of heroism, about how he’d killed seventy Israelis in the battle at Kherbet-Jeddin.

Of course you remember the Black September operation and the kidnapping of Israel’s Olympic athletes in Munich. I know what you think about that kind of operation, and I know you were one of the few who dared take a stand against the hijacking of airplanes, the operations abroad, and the killing of civilians. People said your position sprang from your fears for your wife and children in Galilee, but you said no, and you were right. I’m completely convinced of your position now, even though at the time I believed you only wanted to protect your family. As you used to say, “If you want to win a war, you don’t go in for acrobatics, and if you don’t respect the lives of others, you don’t have the right to defend your own.”

Saleh al-Jashi claimed you didn’t take part in the battle of Kherbet-Jeddin. We didn’t believe him, though. That old hunchbacked man with a large nose sat in his house receiving condolences and congratulations on his son’s martyrdom, and seized the occasion to recount his own glories and those of the bands that came from al-Kweikat and Sha’ab and Ain al-Zaitoun to support the fighters of al-Kabri. And when someone asked about you, he raised his finger and said, no, he didn’t remember you being with them. Puffing out his chest, he told the story of the ambush: “The people of al-Kabri won’t forget the victory they tasted at Kherbet-Jeddin! If we’d fought throughout Palestine the way we did at al-Kabri, we wouldn’t have lost the country!”

“But we’re fighting now,” a voice said. A youth, one of Husam’s comrades.

“We’ll see, my son. We’ll see what you can do.” Then Saleh al-Jashi started telling us about the Israeli convoy that fell into the ambush.

I want to ask you, was the fall of Ain al-Zaitoun, al-Kabri, and al-Birwa revenge for Kherbet-Jeddin?

Umm Hassan said she went past there on her way to al-Kweikat and amid the ruins saw a burned-out bus and the remains of an armored car; the Israelis had set up a monument to their dead.

“What about us — what will we put up there?” I asked her.

“What will we put up?” she asked in surprise.

“After the liberation, I mean,” I said.

She looked at me with half-closed eyes as though she didn’t understand what I was getting at. Then she laughed.

Umm Hassan’s right. We’ll never put up anything — we can’t even manage a decent burial ground, let alone a monument. For the fifteen hundred individuals who fell at Sabra and Shatila, we built nothing. The mass grave has turned into a field where children play soccer. Some even say that the whole of Shatila will be razed soon.

Monuments aren’t important, only the living count. But why did Abu Husam claim you didn’t take part in the battle, and why, instead of weeping for his son, did he sit like a puffed-up cockerel boasting of his heroic deeds?

Tell me what really happened.

I don’t want to listen to that cripple boasting that a hand grenade went off in his pocket and didn’t kill him. I didn’t believe the story, but you confirmed it, laughing, “The poor man was frightened for his manhood. Blood was spurting out of him, and he put his hand between his thighs, and when he was sure the injury was elsewhere he started jumping for joy before fainting from the pain. We were a band of fighters on our way to al-Birwa. Saleh al-Jashi was hanging out of the window of the bus when the grenade went off in his pocket and he fell. We took him back to al-Kabri and continued on to al-Birwa. Then he met up with us again at the Sha’ab garrison after he’d become crippled.”

That was in May of ’48.

Al-Kabri had been in turmoil for two months. At the beginning of February, a band of Israelis attacked the village and tried to blow up the house of Fares Sarhan, a member of the Arab Higher Committee. The attack failed, and the band that made it to Sarhan’s house would’ve been wiped out if they hadn’t withdrawn under a hail of bullets.

On the same day, the commander of al-Kabri’s militia, Ibrahim Ya‘qub, saw a Jewish armored car leave Jeddin at the head of a convoy of vehicles in the direction of the main road that leads to Safad via Nahariyyeh. He rushed to Alloush, commander of the Arab Liberation Army in the area, to ask him for help, but Alloush refused because he hadn’t received any orders.

Ibrahim gathered the fighters and divided them in two, the first group in the area of al-Rayyis, two kilometers southwest of al-Kabri, and a group at the cemetery.

The first group blocked the road with rocks and stones while the second set up an ambush in the cemetery under the command of Saleh al-Jashi.

The Israeli convoy stopped where the road was blocked but didn’t retreat. The armored car pulled back and the bulldozer moved forward, followed by three armored cars, two trucks, and a bus.

Then all hell broke loose.

The battle began at noon. After the bulldozer succeeded in clearing a way, Saleh threw a hand grenade, but it didn’t explode. He threw another, and it made a terrible noise and produced a lot of dust, but the convoy continued to advance. Suddenly one of the armored cars turned and burst into flame. How did it catch fire? No one knows. Did a third grenade hit it or did it collide with the pile of rocks at the crossroads and catch fire?

Saleh didn’t know.

But he does know that the convoy halted in its tracks and the firing started. It was a bloodbath. The firing went on until dawn.

Sitting in his house among the mourners, Saleh described what happened:

“They began getting out of the armored cars and tried to spread out among the olive trees while we fired at them with our rifles. We had English rifles, some hand grenades, and one Sten gun. Not one of them got away. They couldn’t fight, and they didn’t raise a white flag. We fired and received occasional fire from the windows of the bus or from the perimeter of the ambush. The firing didn’t stop until we’d killed every last one of them.

“In the morning, the British came to remove the bodies. I stayed up the whole night in the cemetery with a few young men from al-Birwa and Sha’ab who’d come to lend their support. The rest gathered the arms of the Israelis and went home to sleep. General Ismail Safwat, chief of staff of the Arab Liberation Army, came, was photographed in front of the destroyed Israeli vehicles, before confiscating our stash of arms, from which he gave us back eleven rifles and seven boxes of ammunition.

“What kind of army was that? And what kind of liberation?”